Episode 1: Docking and Berthing
Episode Info Episode 1: Docking and Berthing was released on December 11, 2014. Transcript David: Hey everyone. Welcome to the inaugural episode of The Orbital Mechanics Podcast. Man, its been a long timing coming but it looks like this little show is about to clear the tower so, with that said... Liftoff. Music David: Alright, this is it. The first episode of The Orbital Mechanics. I'm very excited. How are you feeling Ben? Ben: Ahh, yea. I’m pretty excited. It's been a long time getting this going and it's pretty cool to be going. David: Yea, I think it's been a couple months at least, hasn't it? Ben: Do we need to introduce ourselves? David: Oh. I suppose. I'm David. David Fourman. I'm on the website so, yea. And you are... Ben: And I'm Ben Etherington. David: Ben Etherington. All four syllables. I learned that, yea, not Ether-ring-tin. Ben: It's not Eth-ring-tin, it's ether-ring-tin, yea. David: Ether-ring-tin, okay. Cool, yea. So those are our names, I'm not good at introducing myself. We've only known each other for what, about... I guess two or three months? Ben: Almost two months. Yea, for sure. David: Two months, and we've never met in real life, just so everyone knows out there in podcast land. We are separated by, I don't know, a thousand miles or so? Ben: Yea. David: You're in Chicago, I'm in Florida. Alright, so let's get on to the show itself. So what we're going to do is we are going to talk about just some general news. We're just going to go down the list of things that have been happening in the world of spaceflight. If you haven't figured it out already, this is a podcast. Its basically gonna be all about spaceflight. Not so much galaxies and quasars, but rocket engines, all the cool stuff as far as I'm concerned. laughs David: What is first on our list here? Ben: So we've got a lot of news in the last two weeks. This is a good time for spaceflight. David: Yea. In fact, I remember you saying at one point that there might be slow periods here and there, and so far that doesn't seem to have happened. Ben: Yea, it hasn't happened in two months. David: It's been one thing after another and I feel like we've been behind. I mean that's the whole reason why we we wanted to get this going as soon as possible, because it's like there's just so much going on and I feel like we are missing out on talking about it. So tell us about what has launched this week. Ben: Okay! So these are not in chronological order because I can't be bothered. We have Hayabusa 2, which is on its way out to an asteroid, and it's also a really awesome ship because its got an ion thruster. Which is not something that we see too terribly often. David: Yea, I like ion thrusters. They have very high specific impulse, very low specific thrust. If you don't know what that means, we'll get to it in due time. Alright, go ahead. Sorry. Ben: So it's going to be landing on a carbonaceous asteroid named 1999 JU3, and it'll be landing in the middle of 2018 , and it'll be back home with little pieces of asteroid in 2020. David: So that's going to – and I was trying to find some details on how it's going to do what it's going to do because this asteroid has extremely low gravity – almost nonexistent. So how is it going to...? Ben: It's lower than Churyumov-Gerasimenko. I mean, this thing is relatively tiny. TRANSCRIPTION – 2m59s